insane medical costs

AFAICT, none of the ailments mentioned would be service-connected, therefore I don't see how the VA should be expected to foot the bill. I do know from helping my uncle that a lot of VA medical benefits are means tested.
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I am not sure where I said thet should be covered by VA benefits. I did however show where VA treatment seems arbitrary.

My dad, honorably discharged. diagnosed diabetic ~2 years after discharge. never requested any VA benefits till diagnosed with prostate cancer, and then only to see if benefits were available considering his younger brothers experiences.

My uncle, honorably discharged. diagnosed diabetic ~4 years after service. receives VA treatment from everything down to common cold.

Me, medically discharged due to diabetes discovered during med exam related to requested transfer (upon return from middle east) from artillery to sniper training. <-- was too damn cocky and wide eyed to take the comm duty I qualified for out of Paris Island. If I hadn't requested the transfer, I probably woulda completed my hitch without the discharge.

What is it about military service that seems to engender a sense of permanent entitlement?
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I am not sure were this came from, but I believe in everyone being treated equal. I have never applied for VA bennies, but did encourage my dad to as he had taken early retirement due to sensitivity to heavy metals (most likely (according to several Dr's) due to his time in the Med in the Navy and his electronics duty assignment.)

I hold a high deal of respect for my father. Joined the Navy at 17 (straight A's all through HS) in order to not have to work in the coal mines. Sent part of his pay home to his family the entire time in the Navy, and for many years after. Was highly regarded enough to serve on the Honor Guard at Arlington the day Pres. Kennedy laid to rest the body of the Unknown Soldier. Worked hard all his life, and never asked for a thing. Then to see him and my mom having financial difficulties due to escalating health care costs, livable life long diseases with little to no insurance help (He has maintained insurance on his own since the early retirement (eligible for SS at 62, choose to work till 67, only to have the metals sensitivity force him to retire at 65)). He only dropped that insurance when the premiums went over $1000 a month (due to the Castlemans diagnosis).

I am not so sure I agree that every serviceman / servicewoman should receive free medical care for the remainder of ther life, just as State (here in NC) and Federal legislators should not receive free, super premium medical insurance for the rest of their lives.

Most all military serve due to a sense of duty to the country. These politicians seem to serve as a duty to themselves.
 
Now that you have finisher you dissertation of quotes related to the COTUS, what is your solution to medical costs that are crippling the middle class?
 
"crippling" and "middle class"....

being pretty freighted terms and vague at best, I suppose a lot people have said that the costs are 'crippling' the 'middle class'.
The link is to an article that doesn't exactly put in those terms but let's not get into a purely vocabulary discussion.

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10077/1043764-84.stm

The crippling would of necessity fall on individuals and families and the class implications are dependent, I suppose, on your position on 'class' in general. But the sense of a few articles I read this morning is that already high and rising health costs are indeed burdening the middle incomes in a way that reduces their discretionary spending to a significant degree, which burdens them and by extension the economy at large. There are two issues 1) out-of-pocket expenses are rising as workers are moved to HDHP policies and 2) the money paid out by employers is not availble for salary and wage increases.
On top of this is the very real likelihood that overall medical costs are going to continue to rise at anywhere from 5-8% above inflation and as that compounds those costs will take an increasingly large share of total income and benefits paid out by employers. It isn't hard to see that at such rising cost levels something has to give-in fact is already giving in the form of shifts to HDHP policies and the increase in middle income uninsured.
Setting aside the loaded wording, it is still worrying that such costs and their inevitable rise are going to be making the middle incomes insufficient to cover both health care and other normal costs of a middle class life-sufficient retirement savings among others, education, child care for working couples, other insurance, home maintenance, care of elderly parents in many cases, clothing, vacations, etc. .
A blanket denial that any of this constitutes anything but the normal charges against a middling income is certainly a defensible position and hard to argue against-the repost to any counter would be that there is no laundry list of what you get as a member of the middle class and if you want health care more than other things then buy health care and stop moaning. The validity or usefulness of such a position would, undoubtedly, be an eye-of-beholder situation.
 
Is that major increase (my plan implemented the 20-25% jump last year; this year's [my year starts 7/15/11]) was less than a 1% increase) just the extra cash inflow needed to cover the increased costs of the new benefits mandated by the feds? I would venture to say most of it is.

A lot more is covered than before, somebody's gotta pay for that extra.
 
You are lucky then....

premiums went up 9% 2010-2011 on our plan (ex plan I should say)and we were informed in a news letter that 2011-2012 would be up 4-5%-all of this compounding of course. The big provider in California attempted a 35% increase last year but was humiliated into backing down. But they will just nickle and dime up to that one way and another. It's a classic inflexible commodity where the price mechanism begins to be an unreliable indicator. People will just not go forever without care and that gives the industry a big advantage. Even the countervailing force of government can't really solve the basic cost increases that are separate from insurance and setting the medical loss ratio for the insurers is not going to anything either.
None of this would matter if the whole thing were being applied to a small part of the economy, it could be absorbed, but applied to 17-18% of GDP it is a systemic issue.
 
Oh, maybe I'm ....

misreading . I thought this year is only 1%:huh:
Have I got that wrong.

The 20-25% is certainly not lucky(more like criminal), Sorry:blackeye:
 
for me:

2005 - 11% increase
2006 - 2% increase
2007 - 7% increase
2008 - 9% increase
2009 - 5% increase
2010 - 21% increase
2011 - 18% increase

this is a plan with 25000 members.
 
Boy, they really started cranking...

it up in the wake of the Reform, huh?
I am anxious to see if someone starts following how many people start dropping out as a result of sheer cost increases. It would be the most delicious (I have a twisted sense of these things:devil:)irony if the push for universality wound up being self defeating. That is to say the insurers start ratcheting up cost to defend against high risk enrollees only to force others out from price shock.
 
usta in Portland said:
it up in the wake of the Reform, huh?
I am anxious to see if someone starts following how many people start dropping out as a result of sheer cost increases. It would be the most delicious (I have a twisted sense of these things:devil:)irony if the push for universality wound up being self defeating. That is to say the insurers start ratcheting up cost to defend against high risk enrollees only to force others out from price shock.
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Honestly I think that was the plan. I don't think anyone believed "Obamacare" would work. Nobody that has any economic sense and understands how insurance works can believe that mandating the coverage of pre-existing conditions will do anything but send prices to the moon. I think Obamacare was intentionally designed to sabotage the system and make it so bad that that the public would demand that the government "do something". After all the damage the government has done to the health care industry universal single payer is the only thing left for them to do.

In fact with pre-existing conditions covered and the penalty for not buying insurance so low there is no reason to buy it until you need it. If SCOTUS throws out the insurance mandate and keeps the pre-existing condition coverage you probably won't even be able to buy insurance at all.
 
The end result may be....

close to your description but rather doubt the conspiratorial nature of the bill itself-I simply don't have enough regard for our politicians to think they could pull off something so sophisticated and then follow through on it. They seem incapable of getting out of their own way. It's amazing how stupidity, incompetence and ham-handedness can resemble deliberate mailiciousness, but it very often does. I am, and was, opposed to his Reform on grounds very different from yours,I'm sure, so my hope is that SCOTUS takes the whole thing down. This is one of those cases where something is definitely not better than nothing.
 
Hanlon's razor

"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."

That's probably true but it's still hard to believe.
 
But... but...

"I don't think anyone believed "Obamacare" would work."

Oh... I dunno about that. I remember being chastised on this very forum for questioning the wisdom of the path taken by Teh One.
 
Could the travails of co-workers, friends and familyrelated by

our friend from North Carolina be an indication of the "Two Americas" that John Edwards spoke so eloquently of?
 
meh

"ObamaCare is just one of the many power grabs made by the Statist whose administration is the biggest wet blanket on job creation and investment this nation has ever been burdened with."

- Me
 
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